Are kids still using the Dick and Jane books to learn to read? You know the ones. “See Dick. See Jane. Jane has been bitten by a zombie. Flee, Dick, flee!” Except without the zombies part. The Dick and Jane books were created by William S. Gray and Zerna Sharp back in the 1930s, and they’ve been a staple of many a young kiddo’s early education in the decades since. Not surprisingly, they’ve also been the subject of many parodies over the years, but this one may be our favorite: Fun with Kirk and Spock.

When your franchise has been going on for almost fifty years, like Star Trek, there are going to be plenty of missed opportunities. Shows have been cancelled, stories have been left untold, and movies have been left unmade. One example of this is a never seen script for a solo Star Trek: The Next Generation that, while it was written in 1993—at least a first draft was finished in 93—never came to fruition.

Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Movie was penned by Rick Berman, who tweeted out this picture of the cover page just the other day, and Maurice Hurley, who both notably served as producers on the series over its seven-season, 178-episode run. Okay, that’s not entirely how it went down, Berman and Hurley tag teamed the idea, but when then Hurley, who filled the head writer slot on the series for a number of years, went solo for the screenplay.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is absolutely everywhere right now. There are segments about it on the evening news, people I barely knew in high school are posting videos on their Facebook pages and calling out their friends, and, of course, loads of celebrities are getting in on the act. We’ve reached the point where there has become a backlash, and that backlash has even gotten big enough that there’s a backlash against the backlash. How quickly the whole phenomenon has grown and spread, and the way it’s evolved, is fascinating. So we have to write about this at least once, and who better to get us to do that than Star Trek: The Next Generation lead, and Professor X himself, Patrick Stewart, who has one of the best videos yet. But he’s not the only member of team sci-fi doing this.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not the only celebrity to try to get out of dousing himself with cold, cold water, though it looks like he’s going to make a sizeable donation. At least we hope that’s why he’s got his checkbook out, otherwise he’s just kind of a dick, and he’s never come across as one before, so why start now?

Sly Stallone and damn near every other aging action star on the planet took to the big screen again this past weekend in The Expendables 3. We can take that franchise or leave it, but we do have to admit we love the concept of uniting a team of utter badasses from assorted franchises we know and love (or love to hate). So let’s eject Stallone, Statham, and the rest and instead assemble the ultimate Sci-Fi Expendables team, the first and only people you need to call if you need some dirty deeds done right (but not dirt cheap). The GFR team put our heads together to figure out who should make the team, and after some arguing, a lot of swearing, and one really undignified slap-fight, we came up with 16 candidates…the same number of folks on the Expendables 3 poster. Here’s who made the cut.

Sarah Connor
When you first met Sarah Connor, she was a meek, mild-mannered waitress just sort of floating aimlessly through her life. Encounters with a vicious, single-minded cyborg from the future, sent back to hunt you down so your son is never born, have a way of changing that. Over the course of the first two movies in the Terminator movies, Sarah transforms into a serious action star, teaching herself all manner of combat and survival skills, actively seeking out any and all knowledge that might help her in her one-woman war against Cyberdyne Systems and a future ruled by human-hunting machines. Basically, she’s a perfect addition to your team of mercs, and will always be working to improve her already ample skill set and add to the team.

When you write, especially in a public forum, you open yourself up to all kinds of criticism. Some is legitimate, still more is knee jerk reaction, and then there are the people who just want to yell at you and be dicks. (Internet comments sections can be great places for writers and websites to interact with readers and open an honest dialogue, but they can also be the basest cesspool of humanity, like the guy who told a friend he hoped he died in a car crash because a video on his website wouldn’t play, or the feminist-leaning site having a problem with anonymous rape gifs.) Sometimes writers yell back, but sometimes they also deliver the perfect, well thought out replies, like the case of Star Trek writer David Mack who responded to a distressed homophobic reader.

Mack is the author of a number of Trek novels across a variety of incarnations of the show. In his most recent book, the Deep Space Nine adventure Harbinger, there is a lesbian relationship between and Klingon spy and a Vulcan. Encountering such a connection enraged one reader so much that he took it upon himself to write to Mack the following message:

If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that beaming things up is totally awesome. I wouldn’t mind beaming over another cup of coffee as I sit here right now, and that’s just for starters. Small strides have been made in the creation of real tractor beams (we’re talking microscopic). But here’s a new and interesting twist on this futuristic bit of technology: create it with water.

This is another one of those discoveries that shouldn’t work and has baffled, albeit happily, the scientists working on it. Professors Michael Shats and Horst Punzmann of the Australian National University figured out that wave generators, which you may have seen in swimming pools and smaller wave pools, can move objects floating in the water. But here’s where it gets weird: wave pools can move those objects against the waves.